Maybe the obfuscation is so intense that it's impossible to find. I know you can't look in .exe files to look at code as far as I know so maybe it's something similar there.

Sure you can. It'll just be assembly you'll be looking at, and that's far harder to read/understand than e.g. java source code is. Which may be why no one has bothered to reverse engineer the code, to figure out the algorithm.

NES games had to be packed super small, so having a feature-rich game was hard, because of the limits. Not only is it probably obfuscated and compressed to hell, but it was probably written in a way to not make it any bigger that it had to be. Kind of like how intense J4K games are sometimes written in an odd non-obvious way.

NES games had to be packed super small, so having a feature-rich game was hard, because of the limits. Not only is it probably obfuscated and compressed to hell, but it was probably written in a way to not make it any bigger that it had to be. Kind of like how intense J4K games are sometimes written in an odd non-obvious way.

The first zelda game only takes up 129 kb, on my end.

IMO it's pretty amazing to see how all those old games that entertained for hours on end were packed up into a minuscule file size like that.

I don't even see this as "archaeological". Sure the assembly is ancient, but I mean if you want to have item drops in your game and want it to be balanced kinda - you gotta think about this kinda stuff and write some kind of algorithm

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